January 2024 – The Farmer's Blogger

Hello friends!

Well, we got a decent amount of snow recently, about 18 inches in total, so not as bad as some places, but enough to be enough. It was funny, it managed to snow pretty much only on days where I had to work on outside projects or be out in town. Funny how that is.

It also got down to about -7°. That’s Fahrenheit. For my Celsius using friends, that’s somewhere Around -21°. That is, regardless of how you label it, really freaking cold.

That’s painfully cold. The ponies’ whiskers froze. Understandably, they hardly left the barn. I really can’t blame them, I hardly left my room unless I was grabbing food or hugging ponies. Watson has exclusively lived under blankets. He grumbles if you get up and move the blanket, grumbles if the heater is turned down, it’s hard to be small when it’s cold. It’s really hard to be small when there’s 18 inches of snow in your backyard. He misjudged how deep it was off the step, jumped in the snow, and just got so mad. Day ruiner. We got him inside all warm and dry, he survived.

In other news, we’ve had more plumbing shenanigans on the farm. I am so over major repair bills. But it is what it is. I called a different plumber from last time, for those concerned. It was a better experience, but I really hope I just don’t have to call any more plumbers for a while.

I walked down to the corral on my lunch break, a daily occurrence, and I noticed a river where there wasn’t one before. Curious, since I hadn’t planned to run a river through my arena. A little investigation later, I found where the water was bubbling up from the ground. Turns out the water line from the house to the horse trough gave up the ghost on me. To be honest, I thought it ran a different way, so I was so confused as to the location of the spout. So, that was a learning experience.

Another thing I learned is that apparently whoever put in all these pipes originally thought shut off valves were optional. So, the only way to turn off the water was to turn off the pump for the whole farm. That obviously wasn’t going to work, especially not in negative degrees, so, well, we built an ice rink instead. Not ideal.

I felt so bad for the first plumber that came out that evening, he looked at it, quoted the project for me, and set the fix for the next day. Then he spent about an hour trying to get his truck and trailer up my snowy driveway. There were a few moments where I thought he was going to need to leave the trailer here. Or that the trailer was going to drag Him down the bank into my pasture. But he eventually got it.

The next set of guys, the following morning, slid down the driveway with their own trailer, and they broke one of their chains too. Then when the second truck came, also got mildly stuck, and then left. Then the third one came with the excavator, it dropped off the excavator, and then fought to climb back out.

At this point my incredibly sweet neighbor, realizing that I still haven’t managed to procure a blade of my own, fired up his adorable little backhoe and came and scraped some of the driveway for me. I really appreciated it.

That said, it took them two days to fix the pipe, and unfortunately they still struggled to get up the driveway so the excavator and the utility trailer stayed over until the temps rose enough.

I am super appreciative that they were able to fix it for me in the snow and everything. Weirdly enough, the pipe didn’t freeze and crack, it didn’t freeze at all, it appears to have just worn through, water pressure or something just wore out a hole. I have no idea. This home ownership shenanigans is hard.

But, otherwise, guys, I’m so excited! My sweet grandma called me up and asked me to stop by one Saturday before bible study. She had something she wanted to give me. Turns out she had purchased a whole cow for butchering and split it up amongst all her family. She gave me about one hundred pounds of meat! She says it’s a christmas gift, she’s being so generous, and I am so grateful! That meat will last us well into summer, and will help tremendously with the grocery bill. It’s always great to have a stocked pantry, such a good feeling. I still want to build a bit of a store room of dry goods over time, but the freezer is stocked for now and I am so pleased!

So that’s been most of what’s new here. Not much due to the weather and the latest repair. As the spring rolls in closer and closer, these updates will hopefully start turning to things like planting and sunshine and flowers and such. I’m really really ready for spring.

Until we chat again my friends!

We are still having this oppressive fog near constantly. It’s just obnoxious

Hi friends!

Been a minute! I know I said I was taking December off, but I hadn’t intended to go completely radio silent. But 2023 decided to get a couple more rounds of chaos in and December was a ride. Buckle in for the most stupid series of events possible. I’m not even joking.

So, November 30th, I was just finishing up work, and I heard my toilet flush. I find this odd, because I’m nowhere near my bathroom and neither is anyone else. Found out a few minutes later that the boys were fighting a battle in the other bathrooms with overflowing and backing up issues. We figured we had a bad clog, which didn’t really make sense because we are pretty careful about things, but ya never know, so I had planned to call a plumber the next day, the boys had solved it but something was clearly still wrong because the pipes were making noises.

The next day, around 3 am, I am awoken by the sound of pipes angrily banging about in my house, and my brother freaking out because he’s just trying to leave for work (which is stressful already because he works in shipping and it’s gift giving season and its snowing) and the house has chosen to revolt. This also wakes my dad up, so we are all now starting our day at 3am, and it only got worse.

To make this longer story shorter, I’ll start summarizing a little. We spent that entire day, a Friday, racking up plumber bills and getting worse and worse news. And in the middle of all this, the power goes out for several hours because of the weather, so I’m stressed AND freezing.

Long story short, the pipe that connects the house to the septic system was obliterated. It was something called Orangeburg and apparently it’s just asbestos cardboard and was most likely installed in the 40s and it decided, on a cold Thursday in 2023, that it was done with our nonsense (yes, I saw the opportunity for the pun, and I left it alone, growth).

So, of course, they can’t fix it that day, and we can’t use anything that puts water or…. particulates…. down the drains, but it’s also snowy and dangerous to drive so we make it work ish. Don’t ask questions, and I won’t lie to you. But it sucked, and we waited excitedly for Monday.

Monday comes, they start work, and immediately slice through the power lines to my house, causing a massive amount of chaos as surging and failing power blows bulbs and trips breakers and fries things and starts a small but unsettling electrical fire. And then there is no power to the house because we got it shut off at the panel, but live wires in the yard.

Thank God the plumbers weren’t hurt, it was such a bad situation and I turned into a total mom, because I was alternating between “thank God you’re okay” and “how the crap didn’t you mark wires first?!”. Turns out they had called the correct people, and the correct people said they had marked things, but in fact, they hadn’t bothered at all. Queue a massive argument between the power company and the plumber. Meanwhile, I’m without power all day. Literally from 8am to 10pm, I was here, trying to spare the rest of the family, and seething. I rage crocheted a set of gloves. See, most electricians don’t really want to come out to deal with a “live wire” situation so we struggled to find someone to fix it for us. It ruined a few things, but that’s an ongoing battle, so I cannot talk much about that.

Of course, because they had live wires, no work got done, so they had to come out the next day, and the next, and the next, because they kept finding more expensive problems. Had to dig more holes, bring more equipment, and we continued to not be able to use the plumbing for more and more days.

The actual plumbing part was finally all done and dealt with and approved on the 13th, but I’m still dealing with the aftermath. That’s why I was completely silent for the first half of the month.

Then work turned into a thing because of end of the year stuff, so I was working stupidly long hours again for the last couple weeks before the holidays, which took all my attention.

And finally, I had planned ahead for a Christmas break, which was so needed, but I ended up sick through the whole thing. Which, okay, sounds like a terrible thing, and admittedly I didn’t enjoy throwing up through Christmas dinner, but I really am sorta glad it happened because I went into that break with a todo list as long as my arm and, because I was sick, I spent my entire break watching movies, hugging critters, playing video games, and just resting instead. I would not have done this if I wasn’t sick, so ya know, a blessing in disguise. Although next time, a nasty cold would have done the same thing, I don’t think the stomach flu was necessary.

So, sorry, it’s a little bit of a drama filled first update, but I wanted to explain why I didn’t manage any sort of anything in December.

The good news is, January has been busy but in a much more chill kinda way. I ended up being on call at work for two weeks straight (still am on-call actually as I write this, hey hey) because everyone else was majorly sick too, but it didn’t actually affect anything except my ability to leave the house so really, been a whole lot of lying low. I’m excited as we get closer to spring for things to get a little more farm centric again. I really think 2024 is gonna be awesome! If nothing else I hope it’s cheaper, dang.

Until we chat again my friends!